Archive: Sep 2010

Andy Stern may no longer be the head of the Service Employees International Union, a post he left in April, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the news. According to the AP, he’s being dragged into an FBI investigation. Just read: “The FBI and the U.S. Labor Department are investigating prominent labor leader Andy […]

Craig Becker has so far refused to recuse himself. Well, perhaps that not the best way to put it. He’s more thrown up his hands and explained that what we thought he would recuse himself from (i.e. things related to the SEIU) and what he meant when he promised to recuse himself are two very different […]

No one would accuse Courtland Milloy of being a staunch supporter of school reform in the District of Columbia. After Michelle Rhee moved to eliminate underperforming teachers from the classroom, Milloy described the move as “Rhee’s way of showing students how to throw a teacher under the bus,” “how adults play Halloween tricks on kids,” […]

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a couple of stories pop up that suggest some teachers are simply tired of their union’s anti-reform stances. First came news that a backer of education reform was putting up some money to help fund a “cheaper, non-political alternative to teacher unions” in Florida. Reports the Florida […]

Randi Weingarten has been making the rounds over the last couple of weeks, traveling the country in search of editorial boards and townhalls to talk to. Being a charming individual, she invariably comes off as reasonable; the standard response usually sounds something like this one from William McKenzie at the Dallas Morning News: Before we […]

The Miami Herald reports that Florida’s statewide teachers union has filed a lawsuit to stop the state from counting votes on a constitutional amendment that would alter class sizes in the state. A lawyer for Florida’s statewide teachers union asked a judge Wednesday to block the counting of votes cast on the Legislature’s proposed state […]

There was a minor dustup over at the Huffington Post when Davis Guggenheim (the director of the pro-education reform documentary Waiting for “Superman”) was criticized by Dan Brown (not the author of The Da Vinci Code, but a schoolteacher) for offering gauzy platitudes instead of actual suggestions for reform. Wrote Brown: Guggenheim presents his teacher […]

It was announced earlier this summer that 241 teachers were fired as a result of the DC Public School’s new IMPACT evaluation system. There was some confusion over how many of those teachers let go were actually deemed “ineffective”; the Washington Post’s Bill Turque has the breakdown: In addition to the 75 teachers with “ineffective” […]